Akai S5000 / S6000

S5000 is my second favorite sampler. It sounds excellent, very clean and polished. Filters are not very aggressive or spectacular (however with resonance), but you get many types to choose (26 types). Good midi implementation, two lfos with many different waves. It has 64 voices of polyphony (s6000 has 128), max 256mb of memory (by using cheap 72pin simms). Very easy to edit, big screen, you can even plug ps2 keyboard. It accepts scsi removable drives and hard disks. You can get optional usb card for transferring and editing samples. S5000 can read *.wav samples and fat32 disks so even without usb card transfer from computer to S5000 is simple and easy. S5000 *.akp format is very popular, all sample converters can convert to akp. For example ChickenSys Translator or AWave which can even create and edit programs. All you need for transfer without usb card is removable drive in your pc (usb or ide) and second scsi removable drive in akai. Personally i use 2gb scsi jazz drives, but you can use more popular zip drives. S5000 is cheap, you can get it for max 200 pounds ($300). There is optional multi fx board eb20, but honestly… effects sounds very cheap… I prefer effects on old S1100. S5000 has additional 8 outs so you can use external effects (i recommend this).

4 Responses to Akai S5000 / S6000

i´m really glad finding the download section for all the needed programs to run my number 1 sampler s6000 from akai :) !http://martin78.com/files/akai_s5000/s5000-stuff.html
but the os download S5/6000 – OS V2.14 isn´t workin how it should .
It´s downloading the s56x210.pdf ! Could u pls check what´s going wrong and rework it ! Would help me alot ! Respekt and thx

Hi Martin,
I excitedly upgraded the firmware to 2.14 recently and now my s5000 has problems reading disks and storing samples in memory and is now practically unusable.
Of course i didn’t think to find a backup of firmware 2.12 before doing this, would you have any info on where i could find the .bin?
Thanks!